Four years ago this Christmas, Kitty Murphy, or Katherine as she calls herself now, came home from England. She called to the door and we both stood there. I couldn’t let her in with you upstairs, even though I desperately wanted to trust her. It was hard to believe who she was, thirty-three then like myself, but so sophisticated looking. She has three children now and a husband, a civil servant in Leeds. After a few minutes I just wanted her to go, I became suspicious like I always do. I muttered and stared down at my feet until I drove her off and closed the door. Then I stood in the hall and realized what I had wanted to say, you’re the only friend I have, don’t leave me, help me to get out of here.
I went up to my parents’ room and stared in the wardrobe mirror, the same style of clothes I’ve worn for seventeen years, the hair combed down the same way, that face that had forgotten the feel of make-up, my short podgy figure. I could be any age up to fifty, a curio to be stared at in the street, and behind me I could see Kitty’s form in the mirror like a whole life which I had lost out on. I hurt you that night although I didn’t mean to, it was just a rage that I could not control. And even afterwards when I had to wash the blood off, never once did you cry out.
Like her, Mr Farrell next door collected boxes. Mrs Smith in the corner shop would hand her down three or four cardboard ones from the high counter and she built a home from them in the back garden, ignoring the jeers of the other girls. Her neighbour’s boxes were made of wood and were ranked with wire mesh on the roof of the shed. She stopped inventing her secret world to watch him stand there, his eyes gazing up into the soft blueness of the evening as if awaiting a revelation. She craned her neck heavenwards as the man climbed with quick, aggravated steps on to the shed, and then a speck emerged like a tiny chariot from beneath the single white cloud.
Mr Noonan came out and called, ‘You’ll win it yet, John,’ and she turned to watch him stride down through the cackling hens in his garden. They scuttled in alarm over the brown earth pecked clean, past the apple trees and into the felt-covered hut smeared with white stains on its sides. Finally, one ran too close and he grabbed it by the neck and twisted as Sandra stood in terror. The hen flapped frantically in the air and then swung limp in the man’s arm as he hung her from a steel hook on a branch and began to pluck the drifting brown snow of feathers.
The bird seemed to shudder as if not fully dead and he gave her another sharp blow across the neck. The other birds pressed themselves against the fence and cackled, trying to fly into her garden with useless wings.
She turned and ran towards her mother who was holding her side and wincing in the kitchen. She dreamt it for the first time that night, the plucked beheaded body of the bird strutting in the garden where the long worms, red like sticks of rock, slithered out from the hedges to catch her. When she tried to run, her feet would not move and then the child’s hand, hard and bony, began to push her forward towards them. She struggled and lost her grip, and down, down she fell until her body jerked awake bathed in sweat against the mattress.
That would always be the sight of death for her, the white pimpled flesh of a headless bird scrambling across the garden.
When I came home from school, the hallway was crammed with neighbours. They went silent as I came in and turned to watch me. I ran quickly through them and found a woman from down the road standing in the kitchen where my mother should have been. ‘You poor child,’ was all she said, ‘you poor child.’ One of them tried to put her arms around me and I screamed and broke free, remembering the times my mother had threatened to give me to the gypsies when I was bold. I ran into the backyard thinking that they must have driven her from the house but she wasn’t there.
Where was she, I kept wondering, why has she left me alone? Then through the open door I saw Johnny come down the stairs and I ran to him. Daddy was walking behind with his face all red and crumpled, like there was no air left in his cheeks. He shook his head slowly and Mrs Moore and Mrs McCormack began to cry. I could feel tears from Johnny’s eyes running on to my face as he held me as though he had fallen and hurt himself. Then Daddy came and put his hands around us both and he was crying too.
A silence seemed to fall in the house and I could only hear hushed voices on the path outside. I started sobbing too because they were all crying and I needed to find my Mammy and ask her what was wrong and why nobody would tell me. Then I realized she must be upstairs, so I broke away from them and ran up the steps two at a time even though somebody tried to stop me.
I opened the door of her room and stopped. Mrs Whelan was sitting beside the bed where a man in a black coat was bent over my mother with his hands on her eyes. ‘Leave my Mammy alone, you!’ I shouted at him, and when he turned I recognized one of the priests from the village. They both looked at me and I grew afraid to approach the bed.
‘Mammy,’ I called, and when her head didn’t turn I called again louder to wake her. I heard Johnny climb the stairs as I ran over to the bed to shake her. Her eyes were wide open but still she didn’t look at me. I felt Mrs Whelan pull me back and say in a low voice, ‘Leave her, Sandra, your mother has gone to God.’
I didn’t cry then because I knew she was wrong. My mother would never leave me like that without saying goodbye. The person in the bed must be someone else, her sister maybe or a neighbour pretending. I knew my mother would come in the door that evening or tomorrow or the day after, all apologies for being away and that everything would be the same as it ever was because how could life go on without her.
You must understand I was only eight years of age, I knew nothing of death or life. Johnny put his arms around me, and I watched my father give Mrs Whelan two bright, shiny pennies to place over her eyes.
That night, her sister came from England with her two brothers and they gave me money and sweets and called me a brave little girl. It was like a party having them there, with tea and cakes and whiskey, and as I lay in the little camp-bed in the dining-room reading my book, I heard a voice singing from the sitting-room. Later on, I woke up when Johnny climbed into the narrow bunk beside me, because the relations had our bed, and without warning he began to cry again and just went on and on though I tried to tell him that Mammy wasn’t really dead, she was just pretending. But he wouldn’t stop and turned his back on me so I could feel his shoulders shaking in the darkness until finally I fell asleep with my head pressed against the back of his neck and my fingers pressed in his hand that had reached out to find mine.
‘… it was on our fourth visit to the house that we finally succeeded in gaining access. Miss O’Connor, who struck us as being very nervous throughout the interview and seemed to be of a somewhat neurotic temperament, opened the door after we had been knocking for fifteen minutes. We had great difficulty in persuading her to allow us into the house.
Finally, having taken our identification cards and examined them for several minutes with the door closed, she opened it again to let us in.
The majority of the furniture and fittings therein seemed to date from the mid sixties and were very worn in appearance although in a clean condition. Miss O’Connor stated that she had lived alone since the death of her father sixteen years previously, and that she had one brother, two years older than her, whose present whereabouts were unknown but whom she believed to be working somewhere in England.
When we explained that the purpose of our visit was to investigate reports from several neighbours who suspected that a second person (whom admittedly, they had never seen) might also be living in the house and could possibly be in need of medical attention, Miss O’Connor again replied that she lived alone. She seemed to indicate, in her own mind at least, that there was some kind of conspiracy against her in the street, and cited some not very coherent examples of this which dated back to the death of her mother in childhood.
At our behest, Miss O’Connor showed us around the house which consisted of two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and a small bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. One of the latter was locked, because, as she explained, she had ceased using it several years